New Delhi's New Gag
Controls over online content add to existing speech restrictions.
India's loud democracy is always keen to express itself, the latest medium being the Web. So Indians were alarmed when the government last month released rules to police the Internet. The rules increase the state's monitoring and make it very easy to block content. And, on closer inspection, they continue the uneasy legal relationship the world's largest democracy has with free speech.
The ostensible rationale for the new rules is national security. Radical Islamist groups have been known to use the Internet to recruit and communicate within India, while the terrorists who laid siege to Mumbai in November 2008 deftly used technology. So a government like India's, accountable to an electorate and checked and balanced by other institutions, is within its rights to step up scrutiny of cyberspace.
Even so, these rules raise eyebrows because they are vague and sometimes unrelated to national security. One rule won't allow users to post information that is "blasphemous," "obscene" or "pornographic." Lashkar-e-Taiba poses many threats to India, but being pornographic isn't one of them. Another rule forces an Internet service provider to censor information within 36 hours if any person writes in to complain.
Such provisions suggest that national security is just an umbrella under which the government is trying to address other social concerns. Though they haven't always been this paranoid over the free flow of information, Indian governments have historically feared sparks that bring fringe groups to violence. India's 1950 constitution enshrines speech as a fundamental right, but allows "reasonable restrictions," such as for "morality." The country's penal code decrees an "outrage" against "religious feelings" unlawful.
But governments have used these caveats as a way to appease mobs. Hindu nationalist groups have vandalized the paintings of M.F. Husain, who has depicted Hindu deities in the nude since the 1990s; yet instead of curbing the vandalism, officials charged Mr. Husain in 2006 for hurting sentiments. Muslims groups have violently protested against Bangladeshi authoress Taslima Nasreen, who is critical of Islam—the local government's response last year was to arrest those who compiled and distributed a book where Ms. Nasreen had expressed her views.
The intention here is to preempt further violence, but the effect is chilling individuals' speech. The very existence of caveats to the legal framework make it easy for mobs to create disturbances and then quickly expect the law to take their side. In this environment, self-censorship is natural; Google, for instance, voluntarily blocked controversial content from its local social networking site in 2009. Freedom House this year ranked India 77th in press freedom among 196 countries.
Part of the problem here is lack of political support for the idea of free speech. Another is political opportunism: Politicians score points by banning controversial books like a biography of Mohandas Gandhi, which the state of Gujarat banned in March. More broadly, the Indian state thinks it can artificially preserve harmony by ensuring neither Hindus nor Muslims are offended. The threat of Islamic terror and radicalization now becomes another reason to paint a gloss over ethnic or religious differences.
This approach could breed real disharmony in the future as genuine grievances are bottled up. If India wants to be a society truly confident of its openness and pluralism, it's better off maintaining strict law and order in the face of violence and relaxing restrictions against speech. Along the way, it will discover that fostering liberal values is the best bulwark against both terrorists and mobs.
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